Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Gender Lottery by William Oday. I've never hate-read something before. Usually if I don't like something, I just DNF it. But this story was so utterly repugnant, I felt like I had to finish it (luckily it was really short).

Do you enjoy reading about rape? Then this is the story for you!

In it, for no explained reason, the birth rate for baby girls went down to some tiny number. What few women were born were required to "nurture" every adult male in the world. "Nurture" was the book's word for it: The remaining women were required to have sex with any adult man who wanted to.

Because men just cannot survive without sex? Really?

So the story opens with a young man just coming of age. He sees one of the women (bound in the town square) for any man to use. He would be of age that evening, so he told her of his plans to come back and rape her.

Then, through a twist of this stupid plot, he won the lottery, which he thought meant that he'd become part of the ruling class. Instead it meant he was turned into a woman.

So after being forced (in detail) to go through transitioning to female (surgery and hormones), it was now his turn to be raped. He was turned into the most beautiful woman on the planet blah blah blah.

Somehow this got 4.25 (of 5) stars on Goodreads. I could not disagree more. The plot lacked any scrap of logic, the whole story existed for the "excitement" of rape.

Nine Last Days on Planet Earth by Daryl Gregory. There were two halves of this story:

The first half (and the one I was really interested in) was that some unknown, never seen alien seeded Earth with plant life. One night thousands and thousands of "shooting stars" (seed canisters) fell from the sky, and the alien plants started growing. In some parts of the world they were a major threat and entire cities were eventually lost. In other parts, Earth plants out-evolved the alien plants and mostly beat them back.

The other half of the story (which I had little interest in) was following just a normal, average man's life from teenager to age 97.

Turns out I read the story incorrectly. Because it was the alien plant plotline I was really only interested in, I missed the whole point of the story, including the meaning of the title: The "Nine Last Days" were nine times the main character did something for the last time in his life. The alien plant subplot was nothing but background, had no meaning or impact for the plot.

It feels strange to have completely focused on the wrong half of the story... but I wish the plant half had been the important half. I don't find "the life of an average man" to be more interesting than "alien plants are trying to gain a foothold on Earth". Ah well.

DNF #62: Coyote Horizon by Allen Steele. Ever have an author ruin a book for you? The first big chunk of this book was a forward by the author about how great his books are. How much everyone loves his books. How many emails he gets every day telling him how good his books are. How he can't stop writing because everyone loves his books so much. Apparently someone did their dissertation on his book series, and boy do they deserve it.

Was this a good book? I'll admit the forward gave me a bad taste in my mouth the entire time I was reading it. Some parts were okay, some parts were boring. By other reviews, it didn't seem like the plot was going anywhere interesting, so I gladly DNFed it. I won't be sending Mr. Steele an email telling him how great his books are.

DNF #63: Icharus: ARC Series by Renee Sebastian. Set on another planet, the story opened with police(???) chasing down some guy (robot?) in a sewer system(?). It didn't hold my attention enough to make me care about finding the answers to any of those questions.

DNF #64: I Level Up Alone by Chugong. This was the oddest book I have ever attempted to read. A novelization of and then translation of a Korean web comic. All of the dialogue was in its own paragraph and in bold. The translation was very poorly done (done by fans, maybe?), the English was extremely rough.

I didn't get far enough into it to see much of the plot, but apparently adult men in Korea hunt monsters (inside games, somehow go physically into them?). The plot was so unoriginal, I had no interest in attempting to wade through all the issues to find out more.

DNF #65: The Gamekeeper by J Porteous. I tried to read this book once before (and DNFed it then too), but somehow missed reviewing it, so it remained on my Kindle and here I am trying it again. World ended, man living on his own finds a young girl, takes her to the closest settlement. I didn't get far the first time I tried reading it and got no further this time.